[(Appreciations, with an Essay on Style)] [Author: Walter Horatio Pater] published on (July, 2006)

figures in the foreground; one of them, in particular, being morecarefully depicted than the others, and in himself very noticeable--aportrait with somewhat puzzling manner and expression, which at oncecatches the eye irresistibly and keeps it fixed.

Play is often that about which people are most serious; and thehumourist may observe how, under all love of playthings, there isalmost always hidden an appreciation of something really engaging anddelightful. This is true always of the toys of children: it is oftentrue of the playthings of grown-up people, their vanities, theirfopperies even, their lighter loves; the cynic would add theirpursuit of fame. Certainly, this is true without exception [165] ofthe playthings of a past age, which to those who succeed it arealways full of a pensive interest--old manners, old dresses, oldhouses. For what is called fashion in these matters occupies, in eachage, much of the care of many of the most discerning people,furnishing them with a kind of mirror of their real inwardrefinements, and their capacity for selection. Such modes orfashions are, at their best, an example of the artistic predominanceof form over matter; of the manner of the doing of it over the thingdone; and have a beauty of their own. It is so with that oldeuphuism of the Elizabethan age--that pride of dainty language andcurious expression, which it is very easy to ridicule, which oftenmade itself ridiculous, but which had below it a real sense offitness and nicety; and which, as we see in this very play, and stillmore clearly in the Sonnets, had some fascination for the youngShakespeare himself. It is this foppery of delicate language, thisfashionable plaything of his time, with which Shakespeare is occupiedin Love's Labours Lost. He shows us the manner in all its stages;passing from the grotesque and vulgar pedantry of Holofernes, throughthe extravagant but polished caricature of Armado, to become thepeculiar characteristic of a real though still quaint poetry in Bironhimself, who is still chargeable even at his best with just a littleaffectation. As Shakespeare laughs broadly at it in Holofernes orArmado, so he [166] is the analyst of its curious charm in Biron; andthis analysis involves a delicate raillery by Shakespeare himself athis own chosen manner.

This "foppery" of Shakespeare's day had, then, its really delightfulside, a quality in no sense "affected," by which it satisfies a realinstinct in our minds--the fancy so many of us have for an exquisiteand curious skill in the use of words. Biron is the perfect flowerof this manner:

A man of fire-new words, fashion's own knight:

--as he describes Armado, in terms which are really applicable tohimself. In him this manner blends with a true gallantry of nature,and an affectionate complaisance and grace. He has at times some ofits extravagance or caricature also, but the shades of expression bywhich he passes from this to the "golden cadence" of Shakespeare'sown most characteristic verse, are so fine, that it is sometimesdifficult to trace them. What is a vulgarity in Holofernes, and acaricature in Armado, refines itself with him into the expression ofa nature truly and inwardly bent upon a form of delicate perfection,and is accompanied by a real insight into the laws which determinewhat is exquisite in language, and their root in the nature ofthings. He can appreciate quite the opposite style--

In russet yeas, and honest kersey noes;

he knows the first law of pathos, that

Honest plain words best suit the ear of grief.

[167] He delights in his own rapidity of intuition; and, in harmonywith the half-sensuous philosophy of the Sonnets, exalts, a littlescornfully, in many memorable expressions, the judgment of thesenses, above all slower, more toilsome means of knowledge, scorningsome who fail to see things only because they are so clear:

So here you find where light in darkness lies,Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes:--

as with some German commentators on Shakespeare. Appealing always toactual sensation from men's affected theories, he might seem todespise learning; as, indeed, he has taken up his deep studies partlyin sport, and demands always the profit of learning in renewedenjoyment. Yet he surprises us from time to time by intuitions whichcould come only from a deep experience and power of observation; andmen listen to him, old and young, in spite of themselves. He isquickly impressible to the slightest clouding of the spirits insocial intercourse, and has his moments of extreme seriousness: histrial-task may well be, as Rosaline puts it--

To enforce the pained impotent to smile.

But still, through all, he is true to his chosen manner: that glossof dainty language is a second nature with him: even at his best heis not without a certain artifice: the trick of playing on wordsnever deserts him; and [168] Shakespeare, in whose own genius thereis an element of this very quality, shows us in this graceful, and,as it seems, studied, portrait, his enjoyment of it.

As happens with every true dramatist, Shakespeare is for the mostpart hidden behind the persons of his creation. Yet there arecertain of his characters in which we feel that there is something ofself-portraiture. And it is not so much in his grander, more subtleand ingenious creations that we feel this--in Hamlet and King Lear--as in those slighter and more spontaneously developed figures, who,while far from playing principal parts, are yet distinguished by apeculiar happiness and delicate ease in the drawing of them; figureswhich possess, above all, that winning attractiveness which there isno man but would willingly exercise, and which resemble those worksof art which, though not meant to be very great or imposing, are yetwrought of the choicest material. Mercutio, in Romeo and Juliet,belongs to this group of Shakespeare's characters--versatile,mercurial people, such as make good actors, and in whom the

nimble spirits of the arteries,

the finer but still merely animal elements of great wit, predominate.A careful delineation of minor, yet expressive traits seems to markthem out as the characters of his predilection; [169] and it is hardnot to identify him with these more than with others. Biron, inLove's Labours Lost, is perhaps the most striking member of thisgroup. In this character, which is never quite in touch, never quiteon a perfect level of understanding, with the other persons of theplay, we see, perhaps, a reflex of Shakespeare himself, when he hasjust become able to stand aside from and estimate the first period ofhis poetry.

1878.

NOTES

162. *Act V. Scene II. Return.

"MEASURE FOR MEASURE"

[170] IN Measure for Measure, as in some other of his plays,Shakespeare has remodelled an earlier and somewhat rough compositionto "finer issues," suffering much to remain as it had come from theless skilful hand, and not raising the whole of his work to an equaldegree of intensity. Hence perhaps some of that depth andweightiness which make this play so impressive, as with the true sealof experience, like a fragment of life itself, rough and disjointedindeed, but forced to yield in places its profounder meaning. InMeasure for Measure, in contrast with the flawless execution of Romeoand Juliet, Shakespeare has spent his art in just enough modificationof the scheme of the older play to make it exponent of this purpose,adapting its terrible essential incidents, so that Coleridge found itthe only painful work among Shakespeare's dramas, and leaving for thereader of to-day more than the usual number of difficult expressions;but infusing a lavish colour and a profound significance into it, sothat under his [171] touch certain select portions of it rise farabove the level of all but his own best poetry, and working out of ita morality so characteristic that the play might well pass for thecentral expression of his moral judgments. It remains a comedy, asindeed is congruous with the bland, half-humorous equity whichinforms the whole composition, sinking from the heights of sorrow andterror into the rough scheme of the earlier piece; yet it is hardlyless full of what is really tragic in man's existence than if Claudiohad indeed "stooped to death." Even the humorous concluding sceneshave traits of special grace, retaining in less emphatic passages astray lire or word of power, as it seems, so that we watch to the endfor the traces where the nobler hand has glanced along, leaving itsvestiges, as if accidentally or wastefully, in the rising of thestyle.

The interest of Measure for Measure, therefore, is partly that of anold story told over again. We measure with curiosity that variety ofresources which has enabled Shakespeare to refashion the originalmaterial with a higher motive; adding to the intricacy of the piece,yet so modifying its structure as to give the whole almost the unityof a single scene; lending, by the light of a philosophy which dwellsmuch on what is complex and subtle in our nature, a true humanpropriety to its strange and unexpected turns of feeling andcharacter, to incidents so [172] difficult as the fall of Angelo, andthe subsequent reconciliation of Isabella, so that she pleadssuccessfully for his life. It was from Whetstone, a contemporaryEnglish writer, that Shakespeare derived the outline of Cinthio's"rare history" of Promos and Cassandra, one of that numerous class ofItalian stories, like Boccaccio's Tancred of Salerno, in which themere energy of southern passion has everything its own way, andwhich, though they may repel many a northern reader by a certaincrudity in their colouring, seem to have been full of fascination forthe Elizabethan age. This story, as it appears in Whetstone'sendless comedy, is almost as rough as the roughest episode of actualcriminal life. But the play seems never to have been acted, and sometime after its publication Whetstone himself turned the thing into atale, included in his Heptameron of Civil Discourses, where it stillfigures as a genuine piece, with touches of undesigned poetry, aquaint field-flower here and there of diction or sentiment, the wholestrung up to an effective brevity, and with the fragrance of thatadmirable age of literature all about it. Here, then, there issomething of the original Italian colour: in this narrativeShakespeare may well have caught the first glimpse of a compositionwith nobler proportions; and some artless sketch from his own hand,perhaps, putting together his first impressions, insinuated itselfbetween Whetstone's work and the play as we actually read it. Out[173] of these insignificant sources Shakespeare's play rises, fullof solemn expression, and with a profoundly designed beauty, the newbody of a higher, though sometimes remote and difficult poetry,escaping from the imperfect relics of the old story, yet not whollytransformed, and even as it stands but the preparation only, we mightthink, of a still more imposing design. For once we have in it areal example of that sort of writing which is sometimes described assuggestive, and which by the help of certain subtly calculated hintsonly, brings into distinct shape the reader's own half-developedimaginings. Often the quality is attributed to writing merely vagueand unrealised, but in Measure for Measure, quite certainly,Shakespeare has directed the attention of sympathetic readers alongcertain channels of meditation beyond the immediate scope of hiswork.

Measure for Measure, therefore, by the quality of these higherdesigns, woven by his strange magic on a texture of poorer quality,is hardly less indicative than Hamlet even, of Shakespeare's reason,of his power of moral interpretation. It deals, not like Hamlet withthe problems which beset one of exceptional temperament, but withmere human nature. It brings before us a group of persons,attractive, full of desire, vessels of the genial, seed-bearingpowers of nature, a gaudy existence flowering out over the old courtand city of Vienna, a spectacle of the fulness and [174] pride oflife which to some may seem to touch the verge of wantonness. Behindthis group of people, behind their various action, Shakespeareinspires in us the sense of a strong tyranny of nature andcircumstance. Then what shall there be on this side of it--on ourside, the spectators' side, of this painted screen, with its puppetswho are really glad or sorry all the time? what philosophy of life,what sort of equity?

Stimulated to read more carefully by Shakespeare's own profoundertouches, the reader will note the vivid reality, the subtleinterchange of light and shade, the strongly contrasted characters ofthis group of persons, passing across the stage so quickly. Theslightest of them is at least not ill-natured: the meanest of themcan put forth a plea for existence--Truly, sir, I am a poor fellowthat would live!--they are never sure of themselves, even in thestrong tower of a cold unimpressible nature: they are capable of manyfriendships and of a true dignity in danger, giving each other asympathetic, if transitory, regret--one sorry that another "should befoolishly lost at a game of tick-tack." Words which seem to exhaustman's deepest sentiment concerning death and life are put on the lipsof a gilded, witless youth; and the saintly Isabella feels fire creepalong her, kindling her tongue to eloquence at the suggestion ofshame. In places the shadow deepens: death intrudes itself on thescene, as among other [175] things "a great disguiser," blanching thefeatures of youth and spoiling its goodly hair, touching the fineClaudio even with its disgraceful associations. As in Orcagna'sfresco at Pisa, it comes capriciously, giving many and long reprievesto Barnardine, who has been waiting for it nine years in prison,taking another thence by fever, another by mistake of judgment,embracing others in the midst of their music and song. The littlemirror of existence, which reflects to each for a moment the stage onwhich he plays, is broken at last by a capricious accident; while allalike, in their yearning for untasted enjoyment, are reallydiscounting their days, grasping so hastily and accepting soinexactly the precious pieces. The Duke's quaint but excellentmoralising at the beginning of the third act does but express, likethe chorus of a Greek play, the spirit of the passing incidents. Tohim in Shakespeare's play, to a few here and there in the actualworld, this strange practical paradox of our life, so unwise in itseager haste, reveals itself in all its clearness.

The Duke disguised as a friar, with his curious moralising on lifeand death, and Isabella in her first mood of renunciation, a thing"ensky'd and sainted," come with the quiet of the cloister as arelief to this lust and pride of life: like some grey monasticpicture hung on the wall of a gaudy room, their presence cools theheated air of the piece. For a moment we [176] are within the placidconventual walls, whither they fancy at first that the Duke has comeas a man crossed in love, with Friar Thomas and Friar Peter, callingeach other by their homely, English names, or at the nunnery amongthe novices, with their little limited privileges, where

If you speak you must not show your face,Or if you show your face you must not speak.

Not less precious for this relief in the general structure of thepiece, than for its own peculiar graces is the episode of Mariana, acreature wholly of Shakespeare's invention, told, by way ofinterlude, in subdued prose. The moated grange, with its dejectedmistress, its long, listless, discontented days, where we hear onlythe voice of a boy broken off suddenly in the midst of one of theloveliest songs of Shakespeare, or of Shakespeare's school,* is thepleasantest of many glimpses we get here of pleasant places--thefield without the town, Angelo's garden-house, the consecratedfountain. Indirectly it has suggested two of the most perfectcompositions among the poetry of our own generation. Again it is apicture within a picture, but with fainter lines and a greyeratmosphere: we have here the same passions, the same wrongs, the samecontinuance of affection, the same crying out upon death, as in thenearer and larger piece, though softened, and reduced to the mood ofa more dreamy scene.

[177] Of Angelo we may feel at first sight inclined to say onlyguarda e passa! or to ask whether he is indeed psychologicallypossible. In the old story, he figures as an embodiment of pure andunmodified evil, like "Hyliogabalus of Rome or Denis of Sicyll." Butthe embodiment of pure evil is no proper subject of art, andShakespeare, in the spirit of a philosophy which dwells much on thecomplications of outward circumstance with men's inclinations, turnsinto a subtle study in casuistry this incident of the austere judgefallen suddenly into utmost corruption by a momentary contact withsupreme purity. But the main interest in Measure for Measure is not,as in Promos and Cassandra, in the relation of Isabella and Angelo,but rather in the relation of Claudio and Isabella.

Greek tragedy in some of its noblest products has taken for its themethe love of a sister, a sentiment unimpassioned indeed, purifying bythe very spectacle of its passionlessness, but capable of a fierceand almost animal strength if informed for a moment by pity andregret. At first Isabella comes upon the scene as a tranquillisinginfluence in it. But Shakespeare, in the development of the action,brings quite different and unexpected qualities out of her. It ishis characteristic poetry to expose this cold, chastened personality,respected even by the worldly Lucio as "something ensky'd andsainted, and almost an immortal spirit," to two [178] sharp, shamefultrials, and wring out of her a fiery, revealing eloquence. Throwninto the terrible dilemma of the piece, called upon to sacrifice thatcloistral whiteness to sisterly affection, become in a moment theground of strong, contending passions, she develops a new characterand shows herself suddenly of kindred with those strangely conceivedwomen, like Webster's Vittoria, who unite to a seductive sweetnesssomething of a dangerous and tigerlike changefulness of feeling. Theswift, vindictive anger leaps, like a white flame, into this whitespirit, and, stripped in a moment of all convention, she standsbefore us clear, detached, columnar, among the tender frailties ofthe piece. Cassandra, the original of Isabella in Whetstone's tale,with the purpose of the Roman Lucretia in her mind, yields gracefullyenough to the conditions of her brother's safety; and to the lighterreader of Shakespeare there may seem something harshly conceived, orpsychologically impossible even, in the suddenness of the changewrought in her, as Claudio welcomes for a moment the chance of lifethrough her compliance with Angelo's will, and he may have a sensehere of flagging skill, as in words less finely handled than in thepreceding scene. The play, though still not without traces of noblerhandiwork, sinks down, as we know, at last into almost homely comedy,and it might be supposed that just here the grander manner [179]deserted it. But the skill with which Isabella plays upon Claudio'swell-recognised sense of honour, and endeavours by means of that toinsure him beforehand from the acceptance of life on baser terms,indicates no coming laxity of hand just in this place. It was ratherthat there rose in Shakespeare's conception, as there may for thereader, as there certainly would in any good acting of the part,something of that terror, the seeking for which is one of the notesof romanticism in Shakespeare and his circle. The stream of ardentnatural affection, poured as sudden hatred upon the youth condemnedto die, adds an additional note of expression to the horror of theprison where so much of the scene takes place. It is not here onlythat Shakespeare has conceived of such extreme anger and pity asputting a sort of genius into simple women, so that their "lips dropeloquence," and their intuitions interpret that which is often toohard or fine for manlier reason; and it is Isabella with her grandimaginative diction, and that poetry laid upon the "prone andspeechless dialect" there is in mere youth itself, who givesutterance to the equity, the finer judgments of the piece on men andthings.

From behind this group with its subtle lights and shades, its poetry,its impressive contrasts, Shakespeare, as I said, conveys to us astrong sense of the tyranny of nature and [180] circumstance overhuman action. The most powerful expressions of this side ofexperience might be found here. The bloodless, impassibletemperament does but wait for its opportunity, for the almostaccidental coherence of time with place, and place with wishing, toannul its long and patient discipline, and become in a moment thevery opposite of that which under ordinary conditions it seemed tobe, even to itself. The mere resolute self-assertion of the bloodbrings to others special temptations, temptations which, as defectsor over-growths, lie in the very qualities which make them otherwiseimposing or attractive; the very advantage of men's gifts ofintellect or sentiment being dependent on a balance in their use sodelicate that men hardly maintain it always. Something also must beconceded to influences merely physical, to the complexion of theheavens, the skyey influences, shifting as the stars shift; assomething also to the mere caprice of men exercised over each otherin the dispensations of social or political order, to the chancewhich makes the life or death of Claudio dependent on Angelo's will.

The many veins of thought which render the poetry of this play soweighty and impressive unite in the image of Claudio, a flowerlikeyoung man, whom, prompted by a few hints from Shakespeare, theimagination easily clothes with all the bravery of youth, as hecrosses the stage before us on his way to death, coming so [181]hastily to the end of his pilgrimage. Set in the horrible blacknessof the prison, with its various forms of unsightly death, this flowerseems the braver. Fallen by "prompture of the blood," the victim ofa suddenly revived law against the common fault of youth like his, hefinds his life forfeited as if by the chance of a lottery. With thatinstinctive clinging to life, which breaks through the subtlestcasuistries of monk or sage apologising for an early death, hewelcomes for a moment the chance of life through his sister's shame,though he revolts hardly less from the notion of perpetualimprisonment so repulsive to the buoyant energy of youth.Familiarised, by the words alike of friends and the indifferent, tothe thought of death, he becomes gentle and subdued indeed, yet moreperhaps through pride than real resignation, and would go down todarkness at last hard and unblinded. Called upon suddenly toencounter his fate, looking with keen and resolute profile straightbefore him, he gives utterance to some of the central truths of humanfeeling, the sincere, concentrated expression of the recoiling flesh.Thoughts as profound and poetical as Hamlet's arise in him; and butfor the accidental arrest of sentence he would descend into the dust,a mere gilded, idle flower of youth indeed, but with what are perhapsthe most eloquent of all Shakespeare's words upon his lips.

As Shakespeare in Measure for Measure has [182] refashioned, after anobler pattern, materials already at hand, so that the relics ofother men's poetry are incorporated into his perfect work, so tracesof the old "morality," that early form of dramatic composition whichhad for its function the inculcating of some moral theme, survive init also, and give it a peculiar ethical interest. This ethicalinterest, though it can escape no attentive reader, yet, inaccordance with that artistic law which demands the predominance ofform everywhere over the mere matter or subject handled, is not to bewholly separated from the special circumstances, necessities,embarrassments, of these particular dramatic persons. The old"moralities" exemplified most often some rough-and-ready lesson.Here the very intricacy and subtlety of the moral world itself, thedifficulty of seizing the true relations of so complex a material,the difficulty of just judgment, of judgment that shall not beunjust, are the lessons conveyed. Even in Whetstone's old story thispeculiar vein of moralising comes to the surface: even there, wenotice the tendency to dwell on mixed motives, the contending issuesof action, the presence of virtues and vices alike in unexpectedplaces, on "the hard choice of two evils," on the "imprisoning" ofmen's "real intents." Measure for Measure is full of expressionsdrawn from a profound experience of these casuistries, and thatethical interest becomes predominant in it: it is no longer Promosand [183] Cassandra, but Measure for Measure, its new name expresslysuggesting the subject of poetical justice. The action of the play,like the action of life itself for the keener observer, develops inus the conception of this poetical justice, and the yearning torealise it, the true justice of which Angelo knows nothing, becauseit lies for the most part beyond the limits of any acknowledged law.The idea of justice involves the idea of rights. But at bottomrights are equivalent to that which really is, to facts; and therecognition of his rights therefore, the justice he requires of ourhands, or our thoughts, is the recognition of that which the person,in his inmost nature, really is; and as sympathy alone can discoverthat which really is in matters of feeling and thought, true justiceis in its essence a finer knowledge through love.

'Tis very pregnant:The jewel that we find we stoop and take it,Because we see it; but what we do not seeWe tread upon, and never think of it.

It is for this finer justice, a justice based on a more delicateappreciation of the true conditions of men and things, a true respectof persons in our estimate of actions, that the people in Measure forMeasure cry out as they pass before us; and as the poetry of thisplay is full of the peculiarities of Shakespeare's poetry, so in itsethics it is an epitome of Shakespeare's moral judgments. They arethe moral judgments of [184] an observer, of one who sits as aspectator, and knows how the threads in the design before him holdtogether under the surface: they are the judgments of the humouristalso, who follows with a half-amused but always pitiful sympathy, thevarious ways of human disposition, and sees less distance thanordinary men between what are called respectively great and littlethings. It is not always that poetry can be the exponent ofmorality; but it is this aspect of morals which it represents mostnaturally, for this true justice is dependent on just those finerappreciations which poetry cultivates in us the power of making,those peculiar valuations of action and its effect which poetryactually requires.

1874.

NOTES

176. *Fletcher, in the Bloody Brother, gives the rest of it.Return.

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLISH KINGS

[185]

A brittle glory shineth in this face:As brittle as the glory is the face.

THE English plays of Shakespeare needed but the completion of oneunimportant interval to possess the unity of a popular chronicle fromRichard the Second to Henry the Eighth, and possess, as they actuallystand, the unity of a common motive in the handling of the variousevents and persons which they bring before us. Certain of hishistoric dramas, not English, display Shakespeare's mastery in thedevelopment of the heroic nature amid heroic circumstances; and hadhe chosen, from English history, to deal with Coeur-de-Lion or Edwardthe First, the innate quality of his subject would doubtless havecalled into play something of that profound and sombre power which inJulius Caesar and Macbeth has sounded the depths of mighty character.True, on the whole, to fact, it is another side of kingship which hehas made prominent in his English histories. The irony [186] ofkingship--average human nature, flung with a wonderfully patheticeffect into the vortex of great events; tragedy of everyday qualityheightened in degree only by the conspicuous scene which does butmake those who play their parts there conspicuously unfortunate; theutterance of common humanity straight from the heart, but refinedlike other common things for kingly uses by Shakespeare's unfailingeloquence: such, unconsciously for the most part, though palpablyenough to the careful reader, is the conception under whichShakespeare has arranged the lights and shadows of the story of theEnglish kings, emphasising merely the light and shadow inherent init, and keeping very close to the original authorities, not simply inthe general outline of these dramatic histories but sometimes intheir very expression. Certainly the history itself, as he found itin Hall, Holinshed, and Stowe, those somewhat picturesque oldchroniclers who had themselves an eye for the dramatic "effects" ofhuman life, has much of this sentiment already about it. What he didnot find there was the natural prerogative--such justification, inkingly, that is to say, in exceptional, qualities, of the exceptionalposition, as makes it practicable in the result. It is no Henriadehe writes, and no history of the English people, but the sad fortunesof some English kings as conspicuous examples of the ordinary humancondition. As in a children's [187] story, all princes are inextremes. Delightful in the sunshine above the wall into whichchance lifts the flower for a season, they can but plead somewhatmore touchingly than others their everyday weakness in the storm.Such is the motive that gives unity to these unequal and intermittentcontributions toward a slowly evolved dramatic chronicle, which itwould have taken many days to rehearse; a not distant story from reallife still well remembered in its general course, to which peoplemight listen now and again, as long as they cared, finding humannature at least wherever their attention struck ground in it.

He begins with John, and allows indeed to the first of these Englishkings a kind of greatness, making the development of the play centrein the counteraction of his natural gifts--that something of heroicforce about him--by a madness which takes the shape of recklessimpiety, forced especially on men's attention by the terriblecircumstances of his end, in the delineation of which Shakespearetriumphs, setting, with true poetic tact, this incident of the king'sdeath, in all the horror of a violent one, amid a scene delicatelysuggestive of what is perennially peaceful and genial in the outwardworld. Like the sensual humours of Falstaff in another play, thepresence of the bastard Faulconbridge, with his physical energy andhis unmistakable family likeness--"those limbs [188] which Sir Robertnever holp to make"* contributes to an almost coarse assertion of theforce of nature, of the somewhat ironic preponderance of nature andcircumstance over men's artificial arrangements, to, the recognitionof a certain potent natural aristocracy, which is far from beingalways identical with that more formal, heraldic one. And what is acoarse fact in the case of Faulconbridge becomes a motive of patheticappeal in the wan and babyish Arthur. The magic with which naturemodels tiny and delicate children to the likeness of their roughfathers is nowhere more justly expressed than in the words of KingPhilip.--

Look here upon thy brother Geoffrey's faceThese eyes, these brows were moulded out of his:This little abstract doth contain that largeWhich died in Geoffrey; and the hand of timeShall draw this brief into as huge a volume.

It was perhaps something of a boyish memory of the shocking end ofhis father that had distorted the piety of Henry the Third intosuperstitious terror. A frightened soul, himself touched with thecontrary sort of religious madness, doting on all that was alien fromhis father's huge ferocity, on the genialities, the soft gilding, oflife, on the genuine interests of art and poetry, to be credited morethan any other person with the deep religious expression of [189]Westminster Abbey, Henry the Third, picturesque though useless, butcertainly touching, might have furnished Shakespeare, had he filledup this interval in his series, with precisely the kind of effect hetends towards in his English plays. But he found it completer stillin the person and story of Richard the Second, a figure--"that sweetlovely rose"--which haunts Shakespeare's mind, as it seems long tohave haunted the minds of the English people, as the most touching ofall examples of the irony of kingship.

Henry the Fourth--to look for a moment beyond our immediate subject,in pursuit of Shakespeare's thought--is presented, of course, ingeneral outline, as an impersonation of "surviving force:" he has acertain amount of kingcraft also, a real fitness for greatopportunity. But still true to his leading motive, Shakespeare, inKing Henry the Fourth, has left the high-water mark of his poetry inthe soliloquy which represents royalty longing vainly for thetoiler's sleep; while the popularity, the showy heroism, of Henry theFifth, is used to give emphatic point to the old earthy commonplaceabout "wild oats." The wealth of homely humour in these plays, thefun coming straight home to all the world, of Fluellen especially inhis unconscious interview with the king, the boisterous earthiness ofFalstaff and his companions, contribute to the same effect. Thekeynote of [190] Shakespeare's treatment is indeed expressed by Henrythe Fifth himself, the greatest of Shakespeare's kings.--"Though Ispeak it to you," he says incognito, under cover of night, to acommon soldier on the field, "I think the king is but a man, as I am:the violet smells to him as it doth to me: all his senses have buthuman conditions; and though his affections be higher mounted thanours yet when they stoop they stoop with like wing." And, in truth,the really kingly speeches which Shakespeare assigns to him, as toother kings weak enough in all but speech, are but a kind of flowers,worn for, and effective only as personal embellishment. They combineto one result with the merely outward and ceremonial ornaments ofroyalty, its pageantries, flaunting so naively, so credulously, inShakespeare, as in that old medieval time. And then, the force ofHotspur is but transient youth, the common heat of youth, in him.The character of Henry the Sixth again, roi fainéant, with LaPucelle* for his counterfoil, lay in the direct course ofShakespeare's design: he has done much to fix the sentiment of the"holy Henry." Richard the Third, touched, like John, with an effectof real heroism, is spoiled like him by something of criminalmadness, and reaches his highest level of tragic expression [191]when circumstances reduce him to terms of mere human nature.--

A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!

The Princes in the Tower recall to mind the lot of young Arthur:--

I'll go with thee,And find the inheritance of this poor child,His little kingdom of a forced grave.

And when Shakespeare comes to Henry the Eighth, it is not thesuperficial though very English splendour of the king himself, butthe really potent and ascendant nature of the butcher's son on theone hand, and Katharine's subdued reproduction of the sad fortunes ofRichard the Second on the other, that define his central interest.*

With a prescience of the Wars of the Roses, of which his errors werethe original cause, it is Richard who best exposes Shakespeare's ownconstant sentiment concerning war, and especially that sort ofcivil war which was then recent in English memories. The soul ofShakespeare, certainly, was not wanting in a sense of the magnanimityof warriors. The grandiose aspects of war, its magnificentapparelling, he records [192] monumentally enough--the "dressing ofthe lists," the lion's heart, its unfaltering haste thither in allthe freshness of youth and morning.--

Not sick although I have to do with death--The sun doth gild our armour: Up, my Lords!--I saw young Harry with his beaver on,His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly arm'd,Rise from the ground like feather'd Mercury.

Only, with Shakespeare, the afterthought is immediate:--

They come like sacrifices in their trim.

--Will it never be to-day? I will trot to-morrow a mile, and myway shall be paved with English faces.

This sentiment Richard reiterates very plaintively, in associationwith the delicate sweetness of the English fields, still sweet andfresh, like London and her other fair towns in that England ofChaucer, for whose soil the exiled Bolingbroke is made to long sodangerously, while Richard on his return from Ireland salutes it--

That pale, that white-fac'd shore,--As a long-parted mother with her child.--So, weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth!And do thee favour with my royal hands.--

Then (of Bolingbroke)

Ere the crown he looks for live in peace,Ten thousand bloody crowns of mothers' sonsShall ill become the flower of England's face;Change the complexion of her maid-pale peaceTo scarlet indignation, and bedewMy pastures' grass with faithful English blood.--

[193]

Why have they dared to march?--

asks York,

So many miles upon her peaceful bosom,Frighting her pale-fac'd visages with war?--

It is as if the lax, soft beauty of the king took effect, at least bycontrast, on everything beside. One gracious prerogative, certainly,Shakespeare's [194] English kings possess: they are a very eloquentcompany, and Richard is the most sweet-tongued of them all. In noother play perhaps is there such a flush of those gay, fresh,variegated flowers of speech--colour and figure, not lightly attachedto, but fused into, the very phrase itself--which Shakespeare cannothelp dispensing to his characters, as in this "play of the Deposingof King Richard the Second," an exquisite poet if he is nothing else,from first to last, in light and gloom alike, able to see all thingspoetically, to give a poetic turn to his conduct of them, andrefreshing with his golden language the tritest aspects of thatironic contrast between the pretensions of a king and the actualnecessities of his destiny. What a garden of words! With him, blankverse, infinitely graceful, deliberate, musical in inflexion, becomesindeed a true "verse royal," that rhyming lapse, which to theShakespearian ear, at least in youth, came as the last touch ofrefinement on it, being here doubly appropriate. His eloquenceblends with that fatal beauty, of which he was so frankly aware, soamiable to his friends, to his wife, of the effects of which on thepeople his enemies were so much afraid, on which Shakespeare himselfdwells so attentively as the "royal blood" comes and goes in the facewith his rapid changes of temper. As happens with sensitive natures,it attunes him to a congruous suavity of manners, by which angeritself became flattering: [195] it blends with his merely youthfulhopefulness and high spirits, his sympathetic love for gay people,things, apparel--"his cote of gold and stone, valued at thirtythousand marks," the novel Italian fashions he preferred, as alsowith those real amiabilities that made people forget the darkertouches of his character, but never tire of the pathetic rehearsal ofhis fall, the meekness of which would have seemed merely abject in aless graceful performer.

Yet it is only fair to say that in the painstaking "revival" of KingRichard the Second, by the late Charles Kean, those who were veryyoung thirty years ago were afforded much more than Shakespeare'splay could ever have been before--the very person of the king basedon the stately old portrait in Westminster Abbey, "the earliestextant contemporary likeness of any English sovereign," the grace,the winning pathos, the sympathetic voice of the player, the tastefularchaeology confronting vulgar modern London with a scenicreproduction, for once really agreeable, of the London of Chaucer.In the hands of Kean the play became like an exquisite performance onthe violin.

The long agony of one so gaily painted by nature's self, from his"tragic abdication" till the hour in which he

Sluiced out his innocent soul thro' streams of blood,

was for playwrights a subject ready to hand, and [196] became earlythe theme of a popular drama, of which some have fancied survivingfavourite fragments in the rhymed parts of Shakespeare's work.

The king Richard of YnglandWas in his flowris then regnand:But his flowris efter soneFadyt, and ware all undone:--

says the old chronicle. Strangely enough, Shakespeare supposes himan over-confident believer in that divine right of kings, of whichpeople in Shakespeare's time were coming to hear so much; a generalright, sealed to him (so Richard is made to think) as an ineradicablepersonal gift by the touch--stream rather, over head and breast andshoulders--of the "holy oil" of his consecration at Westminster; not,however, through some oversight, the genuine balm used at thecoronation of his successor, given, according to legend, by theBlessed Virgin to Saint Thomas of Canterbury. Richard himself foundthat, it was said, among other forgotten treasures, at the crisis ofhis changing fortunes, and vainly sought reconsecration therewith--understood, wistfully, that it was reserved for his happier rival.And yet his coronation, by the pageantry, the amplitude, the learnedcare, of its order, so lengthy that the king, then only eleven yearsof age, and fasting, as a communicant at the ceremony, was carriedaway in a faint, fixed the type under which it has ever [197] sincecontinued. And nowhere is there so emphatic a reiteration as inRichard the Second of the sentiment which those singular rites werecalculated to produce.

Not all the water in the rough rude seaCan wash the balm from an anointed king,--

as supplementing another, almost supernatural, right.--"Edward'sseven sons," of whom Richard's father was one,

Were as seven phials of his sacred blood.

But this, too, in the hands of Shakespeare, becomes for him, like anyother of those fantastic, ineffectual, easily discredited, personalgraces, as capricious in its operation on men's wills as merelyphysical beauty, kindling himself to eloquence indeed, but onlygiving double pathos to insults which "barbarism itself" might havepitied--the dust in his face, as he returns, through the streets ofLondon, a prisoner in the train of his victorious enemy.

How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face!

he cries, in that most poetic invention of the mirror scene, whichdoes but reinforce again that physical charm which all confessed.The sense of "divine right" in kings is found to act not so much as asecret of power over others, as of infatuation to themselves. And ofall those personal gifts the one which alone never altogether failshim is just that royal utterance, his [198] appreciation of thepoetry of his own hapless lot, an eloquent self-pity, infectingothers in spite of themselves, till they too become irresistiblyeloquent about him.

In the Roman Pontifical, of which the order of Coronation is reallya part, there is no form for the inverse process, no rite of"degradation," such as that by which an offending priest or bishopmay be deprived, if not of the essential quality of "orders," yet,one by one, of its outward dignities. It is as if Shakespeare hadhad in mind some such inverted rite, like those old ecclesiastical ormilitary ones, by which human hardness, or human justice, adds thelast touch of unkindness to the execution of its sentences, in thescene where Richard "deposes" himself, as in some long, agonisingceremony, reflectively drawn out, with an extraordinary refinement ofintelligence and variety of piteous appeal, but also with a felicityof poetic invention, which puts these pages into a very select class,with the finest "vermeil and ivory" work of Chatterton or Keats.

Fetch hither Richard that in common viewHe may surrender!--

And Richard more than concurs: he throws himself into the part,realises a type, falls gracefully as on the world's stage.--Why is hesent for?

To do that office of thine own good willWhich tired majesty did make thee offer.--

Now mark me! how I will undo myself.

[199] "Hath Bolingbroke deposed thine intellect?" the Queen asks him,on his way to the Tower:--

Hath BolingbrokeDeposed thine intellect? hath he been in thy heart?

And in truth, but for that adventitious poetic gold, it would be only"plume-plucked Richard."--

I find myself a traitor with the rest,For I have given here my soul's consentTo undeck the pompous body of a king.

He is duly reminded, indeed, how

That which in mean men we entitle patienceIs pale cold cowardice in noble breasts.

And his grief becomes nothing less than a central expression of allthat in the revolutions of Fortune's wheel goes down in the world.

No! Shakespeare's kings are not, nor are meant to be, great men:rather, little or quite ordinary humanity, thrust upon greatness,with those pathetic results, the natural self-pity of the weakheightened in them into irresistible appeal to others as the netresult of their royal prerogative. One after another, they seem tolie composed in Shakespeare's embalming pages, with just that touchof nature about them, [200] making the whole world akin, which hasinfused into their tombs at Westminster a rare poetic grace. It isthat irony of kingship, the sense that it is in its happiness child'splay, in its sorrows, after all, but children's grief, which givesits finer accent to all the changeful feeling of these wonderfulspeeches:--the great meekness of the graceful, wild creature, tamedat last.--

Give Richard leave to live till Richard die!

his somewhat abject fear of death, turning to acquiescence at momentsof extreme weariness:--

My large kingdom for a little grave!A little little grave, an obscure grave!--

his religious appeal in the last reserve, with its bold reference tothe judgment of Pilate, as he thinks once more of his "anointing."

And as happens with children he attains contentment finally in themerely passive recognition of superior strength, in the naturalnessof the result of the great battle as a matter of course, andexperiences something of the royal prerogative of poetry to obscure,or at least to attune and soften men's griefs. As in some sweetanthem of Handel, the sufferer, who put finger to the organ under theutmost pressure of mental conflict, extracts a kind of peace at lastfrom the mere skill with which he sets his distress to music.--

Beshrew thee, Cousin, that didst lead me forthOf that sweet way I was in to despair!

[201] "With Cain go wander through the shades of night!" cries thenew king to the gaoler Exton, dissimulating his share in the murderhe is thought to have suggested; and in truth there is something ofthe murdered Abel about Shakespeare's Richard. The fact seems to bethat he died of "waste and a broken heart:" it was by way of proofthat his end had been a natural one that, stifling a real fear of theface, the face of Richard, on men's minds, with the added pleadingnow of all dead faces, Henry exposed the corpse to general view; andShakespeare, in bringing it on the stage, in the last scene of hisplay, does but follow out the motive with which he has emphasisedRichard's physical beauty all through it--that "most beauteous inn,"as the Queen says quaintly, meeting him on the way to death--residence, then soon to be deserted, of that wayward, frenzied, butwithal so affectionate soul. Though the body did not go toWestminster immediately, his tomb,

That small model of the barren earthWhich serves as paste and cover to our bones,*

the effigy clasping the hand of his youthful consort, was alreadyprepared there, with "rich [202] gilding and ornaments," monument ofpoetic regret, for Queen Anne of Bohemia, not of course the "Queen"of Shakespeare, who however seems to have transferred to this secondwife something of Richard's wildly proclaimed affection for thefirst. In this way, through the connecting link of that sacred spot,our thoughts once more associate Richard's two fallaciousprerogatives, his personal beauty and his "anointing."

According to Johnson, Richard the Second is one of those plays whichShakespeare has "apparently revised;" and how doubly delightfulShakespeare is where he seems to have revised! "Would that he hadblotted a thousand"--a thousand hasty phrases, we may venture oncemore to say with his earlier critic, now that the tiresome Germansuperstition has passed away which challenged us to a dogmatic faithin the plenary verbal inspiration of every one of Shakespeare'sclowns. Like some melodiously contending anthem of Handle's, I said,of Richard's meek "undoing" of himself in the mirror-scene; and, infact, the play of Richard the Second does, like a musicalcomposition, possess a certain concentration of all its parts, asimple continuity, an evenness in execution, which are rare in thegreat dramatist. With Romeo and Juliet, that perfect symphony(symphony of three independent poetic forms set in a grander one*which it is the merit of German [203] criticism to have detected) itbelongs to a small group of plays, where, by happy birth andconsistent evolution, dramatic form approaches to something like theunity of a lyrical ballad, a lyric, a song, a single strain of music.Which sort of poetry we are to account the highest, is perhaps abarren question. Yet if, in art generally, unity of impression is anote of what is perfect, then lyric poetry, which in spite of complexstructure often preserves the unity of a single passionateejaculation, would rank higher than dramatic poetry, where,especially to the reader, as distinguished from the spectatorassisting at a theatrical performance, there must always be a senseof the effort necessary to keep the various parts from flyingasunder, a sense of imperfect continuity, such as the older criticismvainly sought to obviate by the rule of the dramatic "unities." Itfollows that a play attains artistic perfection just in proportion asit approaches that unity of lyrical effect, as if a song or balladwere still lying at the root of it, all the various expression of theconflict of character and circumstance falling at last into thecompass of a single melody, or musical theme. As, historically, theearliest classic drama arose out of the chorus, from which this orthat person, this or that episode, detached itself, so, into theunity of a choric song the perfect drama ever tends to return, itsintellectual scope deepened, complicated, enlarged, but still with anunmistakable [204] singleness, or identity, in its impression on themind. Just there, in that vivid single impression left on the mindwhen all is over, not in any mechanical limitation of time and place,is the secret of the "unities"--the true imaginative unity--of thedrama.

1889.

NOTES

188. *Elinor. Do you not read some tokens of my son (Coeur-de-Lion)/ In the large composition of this man?

190. *Perhaps the one person of genius in these English plays.

The spirit of deep prophecy she hath,Exceeding the nine Sibyls of old Rome:What's past and what's to come she can descry.

191. *Proposing in this paper to trace the leading sentiment inShakespeare's English Plays as a sort of popular dramatic chronicle,I have left untouched the question how much (or, in the case of Henrythe Sixth and Henry the Eighth, how little) of them may be reallyhis: how far inferior hands have contributed to a result, true on thewhole to the greater, that is to say, the Shakespearian elements inthem.

201. *Perhaps a double entendre:--of any ordinary grave, ascomprising, in effect, the whole small earth now left to its occupantor, of such a tomb as Richard's in particular, with its actual model,or effigy, of the clay of him. Both senses are so characteristicthat it would be a pity to lose either.

202. *The Sonnet: the Aubade: the Epithalamium.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

[205] IT was characteristic of a poet who had ever something abouthim of mystic isolation, and will still appeal perhaps, though with aname it may seem now established in English literature, to a specialand limited audience, that some of his poems had won a kind ofexquisite fame before they were in the full sense published. TheBlessed Damozel, although actually printed twice before the year1870, was eagerly circulated in manuscript; and the volume which itnow opens came at last to satisfy a long-standing curiosity as to thepoet, whose pictures also had become an object of the same peculiarkind of interest. For those poems were the work of a painter,understood to belong to, and to be indeed the leader, of a new schoolthen rising into note; and the reader of to-day may observe already,in The Blessed Damozel, written at the age of eighteen, aprefigurement of the chief characteristics of that school, as he willrecognise in it also, in proportion as he really knows Rossetti, manyof the characteristics which are most markedly personal and his own.Common [206] to that school and to him, and in both alike of primarysignificance, was the quality of sincerity, already felt as one ofthe charms of that earliest poem--a perfect sincerity, taking effectin the deliberate use of the most direct and unconventionalexpression, for the conveyance of a poetic sense which recognised noconventional standard of what poetry was called upon to be. At atime when poetic originality in England might seem to have had itsutmost play, here was certainly one new poet more, with a structureand music of verse, a vocabulary, an accent, unmistakably novel, yetfelt to be no mere tricks of manner adopted with a view to forcingattention--an accent which might rather count as the very seal ofreality on one man's own proper speech; as that speech itself was thewholly natural expression of certain wonderful things he really feltand saw. Here was one, who had a matter to present to his readers,to himself at least, in the first instance, so valuable, so real anddefinite, that his primary aim, as regards form or expression in hisverse, would be but its exact equivalence to those data within. Thathe had this gift of transparency in language--the control of a stylewhich did but obediently shift and shape itself to the mental motion,as a well-trained hand can follow on the tracing-paper the outline ofan original drawing below it, was proved afterwards by a volume oftypically perfect translations from the delightful but difficult[207] "early Italian poets:" such transparency being indeed thesecret of all genuine style, of all such style as can truly belong toone man and not to another. His own meaning was always personal andeven recondite, in a certain sense learned and casuistical, sometimescomplex or obscure; but the term was always, one could see,deliberately chosen from many competitors, as the just transcript ofthat peculiar phase of soul which he alone knew, precisely as he knewit.

One of the peculiarities of The Blessed Damozel was a definiteness ofsensible imagery, which seemed almost grotesque to some, and wasstrange, above all, in a theme so profoundly visionary. The gold barof heaven from which she leaned, her hair yellow like ripe corn, arebut examples of a general treatment, as naively detailed as thepictures of those early painters contemporary with Dante, who hasshown a similar care for minute and definite imagery in his verse;there, too, in the very midst of profoundly mystic vision. Suchdefinition of outline is indeed one among many points in whichRossetti resembles the great Italian poet, of whom, led to him atfirst by family circumstances, he was ever a lover--a "servant andsinger," faithful as Dante, "of Florence and of Beatrice"--with someclose inward conformities of genius also, independent of any merecircumstances of education. It was said by a critic of the lastcentury, not wisely though agreeably to the practice of his time,[208] that poetry rejoices in abstractions. For Rossetti, as forDante, without question on his part, the first condition of thepoetic way of seeing and presenting things is particularisation."Tell me now," he writes, for Villon's

Dictes-moy où, n'en quel pays,Est Flora, la belle Romaine--

Tell me now, in what hidden way isLady Flora the lovely Roman:

--"way," in which one might actually chance to meet her; theunmistakably poetic effect of the couplet in English being dependenton the definiteness of that single word (though actually lighted onin the search after a difficult double rhyme) for which every oneelse would have written, like Villon himself, a more general one,just equivalent to place or region.

And this delight in concrete definition is allied with another of hisconformities to Dante, the really imaginative vividness, namely, ofhis personifications--his hold upon them, or rather their hold uponhim, with the force of a Frankenstein, when once they have taken lifefrom him. Not Death only and Sleep, for instance, and the wingedspirit of Love, but certain particular aspects of them, a whole"populace" of special hours and places, "the hour" even "which mighthave been, yet might not be," are living creatures, with hands andeyes and articulate voices.

[209]

Stands it not by the door--Love's Hour--till she and I shall meet;With bodiless form and unapparent feetThat cast no shadow yet before,Though round its head the dawn begins to pourThe breath that makes day sweet?--

Nay, whyName the dead hours? I mind them well:Their ghosts in many darkened doorways dwellWith desolate eyes to know them by.

Poetry as a mania--one of Plato's two higher forms of "divine" mania--has, in all its species, a mere insanity incidental to it, the"defect of its quality," into which it may lapse in its moment ofweakness; and the insanity which follows a vivid poeticanthropomorphism like that of Rossetti may be noted here and there inhis work, in a forced and almost grotesque materialising ofabstractions, as Dante also became at times a mere subject of thescholastic realism of the Middle Age.

In Love's Nocturn and The Stream's Secret, congruously perhaps with acertain feverishness of soul in the moods they present, there is attimes a near approach (may it be said?) to such insanity of realism--

Pity and love shall burnIn her pressed cheek and cherishing hands;And from the living spirit of love that standsBetween her lips to soothe and yearn,Each separate breath shall clasp me round in turnAnd loose my spirit's bands.

[210] But even if we concede this; even if we allow, in the very planof those two compositions, something of the literary conceit--whatexquisite, what novel flowers of poetry, we must admit them to be, asthey stand! In the one, what a delight in all the natural beauty ofwater, all its details for the eye of a painter; in the other, howsubtle and fine the imaginative hold upon all the secret ways ofsleep and dreams! In both of them, with much the same attitude andtone, Love--sick and doubtful Love--would fain inquire of what liesbelow the surface of sleep, and below the water; stream or dreambeing forced to speak by Love's powerful "control"; and the poetwould have it foretell the fortune, issue, and event of his wastingpassion. Such artifices, indeed, were not unknown in the oldProvençal poetry of which Dante had learned something. Only, inRossetti at least, they are redeemed by a serious purpose, by thatsincerity of his, which allies itself readily to a serious beauty, asort of grandeur of literary workmanship, to a great style. Oneseems to hear there a really new kind of poetic utterance, witheffects which have nothing else like them; as there is nothing else,for instance, like the narrative of Jacob's Dream in Genesis, orBlake's design of the Singing of the Morning Stars, or Addison'sNineteenth Psalm.

With him indeed, as in some revival of the old mythopoeic age, commonthings--dawn, [211] noon, night--are full of human or personalexpression, full of sentiment. The lovely little sceneries scatteredup and down his poems, glimpses of a landscape, not indeed of broadopen-air effects, but rather that of a painter concentrated upon thepicturesque effect of one or two selected objects at a time--the"hollow brimmed with mist," or the "ruined weir," as he sees it fromone of the windows, or reflected in one of the mirrors of his "houseof life" (the vignettes for instance seen by Rose Mary in the magicberyl) attest, by their very freshness and simplicity, to a pictorialor descriptive power in dealing with the inanimate world, which iscertainly also one half of the charm, in that other, more remote andmystic, use of it. For with Rossetti this sense of lifeless nature,after all, is translated to a higher service, in which it does butincorporate itself with some phase of strong emotion. Every oneunderstands how this may happen at critical moments of life; what aweirdly expressive soul may have crept, even in full noonday, into"the white-flower'd elder-thicket," when Godiva saw it "gleam throughthe Gothic archways in the wall," at the end of her terrible ride.To Rossetti it is so always, because to him life is a crisis at everymoment. A sustained impressibility towards the mysterious conditionsof man's everyday life, towards the very mystery itself in it, givesa singular gravity to all his work: those matters never became trite[212] to him. But throughout, it is the ideal intensity of love--oflove based upon a perfect yet peculiar type of physical or materialbeauty--which is enthroned in the midst of those mysterious powers;Youth and Death, Destiny and Fortune, Fame, Poetic Fame, Memory,Oblivion, and the like. Rossetti is one of those who, in the wordsof Mérimée, se passionnent pour la passion, one of Love's lovers.

And yet, again as with Dante, to speak of his ideal type of beauty asmaterial, is partly misleading. Spirit and matter, indeed, have beenfor the most part opposed, with a false contrast or antagonism byschoolmen, whose artificial creation those abstractions really are.In our actual concrete experience, the two trains of phenomena whichthe words matter and spirit do but roughly distinguish, playinextricably into each other. Practically, the church of the MiddleAge by its aesthetic worship, its sacramentalism, its real faith inthe resurrection of the flesh, had set itself against that Manicheanopposition of spirit and matter, and its results in men's way oftaking life; and in this, Dante is the central representative of itsspirit. To him, in the vehement and impassioned heat of hisconceptions, the material and the spiritual are fused and blent: ifthe spiritual attains the definite visibility of a crystal, what ismaterial loses its earthiness and impurity. And here again, by forceof instinct, Rossetti [213] is one with him. His chosen type ofbeauty is one,

Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought,Nor Love her body from her soul.

Like Dante, he knows no region of spirit which shall not be sensuousalso, or material. The shadowy world, which he realises sopowerfully, has still the ways and houses, the land and water, thelight and darkness, the fire and flowers, that had so much to do inthe moulding of those bodily powers and aspects which counted for solarge a part of the soul, here.

For Rossetti, then, the great affections of persons to each other,swayed and determined, in the case of his highly pictorial genius,mainly by that so-called material loveliness, formed the greatundeniable reality in things, the solid resisting substance, in aworld where all beside might be but shadow. The fortunes of thoseaffections--of the great love so determined; its casuistries, itslanguor sometimes; above all, its sorrows; its fortunate orunfortunate collisions with those other great matters; how it looks,as the long day of life goes round, in the light and shadow of them:all this, conceived with an abundant imagination, and a deep, aphilosophic, reflectiveness, is the matter of his verse, andespecially of what he designed as his chief poetic work, "a work tobe called The House of Life," towards which the majority of hissonnets and songs were contributions.

[214] The dwelling-place in which one finds oneself by chance ordestiny, yet can partly fashion for oneself; never properly one's ownat all, if it be changed too lightly; in which every object has itsassociations--the dim mirrors, the portraits, the lamps, the books,the hair-tresses of the dead and visionary magic crystals in thesecret drawers, the names and words scratched on the windows, windowsopen upon prospects the saddest or the sweetest; the house one mustquit, yet taking perhaps, how much of its quietly active light andcolour along with us!--grown now to be a kind of raiment to one'sbody, as the body, according to Swedenborg, is but the raiment of thesoul--under that image, the whole of Rossetti's work might count as aHouse of Life, of which he is but the "Interpreter." And it is a"haunted" house. A sense of power in love, defying distance, andthose barriers which are so much more than physical distance, ofunutterable desire penetrating into the world of sleep, however"lead-bound," was one of those anticipative notes obscurely struck inThe Blessed Damozel, and, in his later work, makes him speaksometimes almost like a believer in mesmerism. Dream-land, as wesaid, with its "phantoms of the body," deftly coming and going onlove's service, is to him, in no mere fancy or figure of speech, areal country, a veritable expansion of, or addition to, our wakinglife; and he did well perhaps to wait carefully upon sleep, for thelack [215] of it became mortal disease with him. One may evenrecognise a sort of morbid and over-hasty making-ready for deathitself, which increases on him; thoughts concerning it, itsimageries, coming with a frequency and importunity, in excess, onemight think, of even the very saddest, quite wholesome wisdom.

And indeed the publication of his second volume of Ballads andSonnets preceded his death by scarcely a twelvemonth. That volumebears witness to the reverse of any failure of power, or falling-offfrom his early standard of literary perfection, in every one of histhen accustomed forms of poetry--the song, the sonnet, and theballad. The newly printed sonnets, now completing The House of Life,certainly advanced beyond those earlier ones, in clearness; hisdramatic power in the ballad, was here at its height; while onemonumental, gnomic piece, Soothsay, testifies, more clearly even thanthe Nineveh of his first volume, to the reflective force, the dryreason, always at work behind his imaginative creations, which at notime dispensed with a genuine intellectual structure. For in mattersof pure reflection also, Rossetti maintained the painter's sensuousclearness of conception; and this has something to do with thecapacity, largely illustrated by his ballads, of telling some red-hearted story of impassioned action with effect.

Have there, in very deed, been ages, in which [216] the externalconditions of poetry such as Rossetti's were of more spontaneousgrowth than in our own? The archaic side of Rossetti's work, hispreferences in regard to earlier poetry, connect him with those whohave certainly thought so, who fancied they could have breathed morelargely in the age of Chaucer, or of Ronsard, in one of those ages,in the words of Stendhal--ces siècles de passions où les âmespouvaient se livrer franchement à la plus haute exaltation, quand lespassions qui font la possibilité We may think, perhaps, that such oldtime as that has never really existed except in the fancy of poets;but it was to find it, that Rossetti turned so often from modern lifeto the chronicle of the past. Old Scotch history, perhaps beyond anyother, is strong in the matter of heroic and vehement hatreds andlove, the tragic Mary herself being but the perfect blossom of them;and it is from that history that Rossetti has taken the subjects ofthe two longer ballads of his second volume: of the three admirableballads in it, The King's Tragedy (in which Rossetti has dexterouslyinterwoven some relics of James's own exquisite early verse) reachingthe highest level of dramatic success, and marking perfection,perhaps, in this kind of poetry; which, in the earlier volume, gaveus, among other pieces, Troy Town, Sister Helen, and Eden Bower.

Like those earlier pieces, the ballads of the [217] second volumebring with them the question of the poetic value of the "refrain"--

Eden bower's in flower:And O the bower and the hour!

--and the like. Two of those ballads--Troy Town and Eden Bower, areterrible in theme; and the refrain serves, perhaps, to relieve theirbold aim at the sentiment of terror. In Sister Helen again, therefrain has a real, and sustained purpose (being here duly variedalso) and performs the part of a chorus, as the story proceeds. Yeteven in these cases, whatever its effect may be in actual recitation,it may fairly be questioned, whether, to the mere reader their actualeffect is not that of a positive interruption and drawback, at leastin pieces so lengthy; and Rossetti himself, it would seem, came tothink so, for in the shortest of his later ballads, The White Ship--that old true history of the generosity with which a youth, worthlessin life, flung himself upon death--he was contented with a singleutterance of the refrain, "given out" like the keynote or tune of achant.

In The King's Tragedy, Rossetti has worked upon motive, broadly human(to adopt the phrase of popular criticism) such as one and all mayrealise. Rossetti, indeed, with all his self-concentration upon hisown peculiar aim, by no means ignored those general interests whichare external to poetry as he conceived it; as he has [218] shown hereand there, in this poetic, as also in pictorial, work. It was butthat, in a life to be shorter even than the average, he found enoughto occupy him in the fulfilment of a task, plainly "given him todo." Perhaps, if one had to name a single composition of his toreaders desiring to make acquaintance with him for the first time,one would select: The King's Tragedy--that poem so moving, sopopularly dramatic, and lifelike. Notwithstanding this, his work, itmust be conceded, certainly through no narrowness or egotism, but inthe faithfulness of a true workman to a vocation so emphatic, wasmainly of the esoteric order. But poetry, at all times, exercisestwo distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye,the ideal aspects of common things, after Gray's way (though Graytoo, it is well to remember, seemed in his own day, seemed even toJohnson, obscure) or it may actually add to the number of motivespoetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation ofthings that are ideal from their very birth. Rossetti did something,something excellent, of the former kind; but his characteristic, hisreally revealing work, lay in the adding to poetry of fresh poeticmaterial, of a new order of phenomena, in the creation of a newideal.

1883.

FEUILLET'S "LA MORTE"

[219] IN his latest novel M. Octave Feuillet adds two charming peopleto that chosen group of personages in which he loves to trace thedevelopment of the more serious elements of character amid therefinements and artifices of modern society, and which make such goodcompany. The proper function of fictitious literature in affordingus a refuge into a world slightly better--better conceived, or betterfinished--than the real one, is effected in most instances lessthrough the imaginary events at which a novelist causes us to assist,than by the imaginary persons to whom he introduces us. Thesituations of M. Feuillet's novels are indeed of a real and intrinsicimportance:--tragic crises, inherent in the general conditions ofhuman nature itself, or which arise necessarily out of the specialconditions of modern society. Still, with him, in the actual result,they become subordinate, as it is their tendency to do in real life,to the characters they help to form. Often, his most attentivereader will have forgotten the actual details of his plot; while[220] the soul, tried, enlarged, shaped by it, remains as a well-fixed type in the memory. He may return a second or third time toSibylle, or Le Journal d'une Femme, or Les Amours de Philippe, andwatch, surprised afresh, the clean, dainty, word-sparing literaryoperation (word-sparing, yet with no loss of real grace or ease)which, sometimes in a few pages, with the perfect logic of a problemof Euclid, complicates and then unravels some moral embarrassment,really worthy of a trained dramatic expert. But the charactersthemselves, the agents in those difficult, revealing situations, sucha reader will recognise as old acquaintances after the first reading,feeling for them as for some gifted and attractive persons he hasknown in the actual world--Raoul de Chalys, Henri de Lerne, Madame deTécle, Jeanne de la Roche-Ermel, Maurice de Frémeuse, many others; towhom must now be added Bernard and Aliette de Vaudricourt.

"How I love those people!" cries Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, ofMadame de Sévigné and some other of her literary favourites in thedays of the Grand Monarch. "What good company! What pleasure theytook in high things! How much more worthy they were than the peoplewho live now!"--What good company! That is precisely what theadmirer of M. Feuillet's books feels as one by one he places them onhis book-shelf, to be sought again. What is proposed here is not totell his last story, [221] but to give the English reader specimensof his most recent effort at characterisation.

It is with the journal of Bernard himself that the story opens,September 187-. Bernard-Maurice Hugon de Montauret, Vicomte deVaudricourt, is on a visit to his uncle, the head of his family, atLa Savinière, a country-house somewhere between Normandy andBrittany. This uncle, an artificial old Parisian in manner, buthonest in purpose, a good talker, and full of real affection for hisheir Bernard, is one of M. Feuillet's good minor characters--one ofthe quietly humorous figures with which he relieves his more seriouscompany. Bernard, with whom the refinements of a man of fashion inthe Parisian world by no means disguise a powerful intelligencecultivated by wide reading, has had thoughts during his tedious stayat La Savinière of writing a history of the reign of Louis theFourteenth, the library of a neighbouring château being rich inmemoirs of that period. Finally, he prefers to write his own story,a story so much more interesting to himself; to write it at apeculiar crisis in his life, the moment when his uncle, unmarried,but anxious to perpetuate his race, is bent on providing him with awife, and indeed has one in view.

The accomplished Bernard, with many graces of person, by his ownconfession, takes nothing seriously. As to that matter of religiousbeliefs, "the breeze of the age, and of science, has blown [222] overhim, as it has blown over his contemporaries, and left empty spacethere." Still, when he saw his childish religious faith departingfrom him, as he thinks it must necessarily depart from allintelligent male Parisians, he wept. Since that moment, however, agaiety, serene and imperturbable, has been the mainstay of hishappily constituted character. The girl to whom his uncle desires tosee him united--odd, quixotic, intelligent, with a sort of patheticand delicate grace, and herself very religious--belongs to an old-fashioned, devout family,. resident at Varaville, near by. M.Feuillet, with half a dozen fine touches of his admirable pencilmakes us see the place. And the enterprise has at least sufficientinterest to keep Bernard in the country, which the young Parisiandetests. "This piquant episode of my life," he writes, "seems to meto be really deserving of study; to be worth etching off, day by day,by an observer well informed on the subject."

Recognising in himself, though as his one real fault, that he cantake nothing seriously in heaven or earth, Bernard de Vaudricourt,like all M. Feuillet's favourite young men, so often erring orcorrupt, is a man of scrupulous "honour." He has already showndisinterestedness in wishing his rich uncle to marry again. Hisfriends at Varaville think so well-mannered a young man more of aChristian than he really is; and, at all events, he will never owehis happiness to a falsehood. If he has great faults, [223]hypocrisy at least is no part of them. In oblique paths he findshimself ill at ease. Decidedly, as he thinks, he was born forstraight ways, for loyalty in all his enterprises; and hecongratulates himself upon the fact.

In truth, Bernard has merits which he ignores, at least in this firstpart of his journal: merits which are necessary to explain theinfluence he is able to exercise from the first over such a characteras Mademoiselle de Courteheuse. His charm, in fact, is in the unionof that gay and apparently wanton nature with a genuine power ofappreciating devotion in others, which becomes devotion in himself.With all the much-cherished elegance and worldly glitter of hispersonality, he is capable of apprehending, of understanding andbeing touched by the presence of great matters. In spite of thathappy lightness of heart, so jealously fenced about, he is to bewholly caught at last, as he is worthy to be, by the serious, thegenerous influence of things. In proportion to his immense worldlystrength is his capacity for the immense pity which breaks his heart.

In a few life-like touches M. Feuillet brings out, as if it wereindeed a thing of ordinary existence, the simple yet delicate life ofa French country-house, the ideal life in an ideal France. Bernardis paying a morning visit at the old turreted home of the"prehistoric" Courteheuse family. Mademoiselle Aliette deCourteheuse, a studious girl, though a bold and excellent rider [224]--Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, "with her hair of that strange colourof fine ashes"--has conducted her visitor to see the library:

One day she took me to see the library, rich in works of theseventeenth century and in memoirs relating to that time. Iremarked there also a curious collection of engravings of thesame period. "Your father," I observed, "had a strongpredilection for the age of Louis the Fourteenth."

"My father lived in that age," she answered gravely. And asI looked at her with surprise, and a little embarrassed, sheadded, "He made me live there too, in his company."

And then the eyes of this singular girl filled with tears.She turned away, took a few steps to suppress her emotion, andreturning, pointed me to a chair. Then seating herself on thestep of the book-case, she said, "I must explain my fatherto you."

She was half a minute collecting her thoughts: then, speakingwith an expansion of manner not habitual with her, hesitating,and blushing deeply, whenever she was about to utter a word thatmight seem a shade too serious for lips so youthful:--"Myfather," she proceeded, "died of the consequences of a wound hehad received at Patay. That may show you that he loved hiscountry, but he was no lover of his own age. He possessed inthe highest degree the love of order; and order was a thingnowhere to be seen. He had a horror of disorder; and he saw iteverywhere. In those last years, especially, his reverence,his beliefs, his tastes, all alike were ruffled to the point ofactual suffering, by whatever was done and said and writtenaround him. Deeply saddened by the conditions of the presenttime, he habituated himself to find a refuge in the past, andthe seventeenth century more particularly offered him the kindof society in which he would have wished to live--a society,well-ordered, polished, lettered, believing. More and more heloved to shut himself up in it. More and more also he loved tomake the moral discipline and the literary tastes of thatfavourite age prevail in his own household. You may even haveremarked that he carried his predilection into minute matters ofarrangement and decoration. You can see from this window thestraight paths, the box in [225] patterns, the yew trees andclipped alleys of our garden. You may notice that in our garden-beds we have none but flowers of the period--lilies, rose-mallows,immortelles, rose-pinks, in short what people call parsonageflowers--des fleurs de curé. Our old silvan tapestries,similarly, are of that age. You see too that all our furniture,from presses and sideboards, down to our little tables and ourarm-chairs, is in the severest style of Louis the Fourteenth.My father did not appreciate the dainty research of our modernluxury. He maintained that our excessive care for the comfortsof life weakened mind as well as body. That," added the girlwith a laugh,--"that is why you find your chair so hard whenyou come to see us."

Then, with resumed gravity--"It was thus that my fatherendeavoured, by the very aspect and arrangement of outwardthings, to promote in himself the imaginary presence of theepoch in which his thoughts delighted. As for myself--need Itell you that I was the confidant of that father, so well-beloved: a confidant touched by his sorrows, full ofindignation at his disappointments, charmed by his consolations.Here, precisely--surrounded by those books which we readtogether, and which he taught me to love--it is here that Ihave passed the pleasantest hours of my youth. In common weindulged our enthusiasm for those days of faith; of the quietlife; its blissful hours of leisure well-secured; for theFrench language in its beauty and purity; the delicate, thenoble urbanity, which was then the honour and the special markof our country, but has ceased to be so."

She paused, with a little confusion, as I thought, at the warmthof her last words.

And then, just to break the silence, "You have explained," Isaid, "an impression which I have experienced again and againin my visits here, and which has sometimes reached the intensityof an actual illusion, though a very agreeable one. The lookof your house, its style, its tone and keeping, carried me twocenturies back so completely that I should hardly have beensurprised to hear Monsieur le Prince, Madame de la Fayette,or Madame de Sévigné herself, announced at your drawing-room door."

"Would it might be!" said Mademoiselle de Courteheuse. [226]"Ah! Monsieur, how I love those people! What good company!What pleasure they took in high things! How much more worthythey were than the people who live now!" I tried to calm alittle this retrospective enthusiasm, so much to the prejudiceof my contemporaries and of myself. "Most truly,Mademoiselle," I said, "the age which you regret had itsrare merits--merits which I appreciate as you do. But then,need one say that that society, so regular, so choice inappearance, had, like our own, below the surface, its troubles,its disorders? I see here many of the memoirs of that time.I can't tell exactly which of them you may or may not have read,and so I feel a certain difficulty in speaking."

She interrupted me: "Ah!" she said, with entire simplicity, "Iunderstand you. I have not read all you see here. But I haveread enough of it to know that my friends in that past age had,like those who live now, their passions, their weaknesses,their mistakes. But, as my father used to say to me, all thatdid but pass over a ground of what was solid and serious, whichalways discovered itself again anew. There were great faultsthen; but there were also great repentances. There was acertain higher region to which everything conducted--even whatas evil." She blushed deeply: then rising a little suddenly,"A long speech!" she said: "Forgive me! I am not usually sovery talkative. It is because my father was in question; andI should wish his memory to be as dear and as venerable to allthe rest of the world as it is to me."

We pass over the many little dramatic intrigues and misunderstandings,with the more or less adroit interferences of the uncle, which raiseand lower alternately Bernard's hopes. M. Feuillet has more than oncetried his hand with striking success in the portraiture of Frenchecclesiastics. He has drawn none better than the Bishop of Saint-Méen,uncle of Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, to whose interests he is devoted.Bernard feels that to gain the influence of this prelate [227] wouldbe to gain his cause; and the opportunity for an interview comes.

Monseigneur de Courteheuse would seem to be little over fiftyyears of age: he is rather tall, and very thin: the eyes, blackand full of life, are encircled by a ring of deep brown. Hisspeech and gesture are animated, and, at times, as if carriedaway. He adopts frequently a sort of furious manner whichon a sudden melts into the smile of an honest man. He hasbeautiful silvery hair, flying in vagrant locks over hisforehead, and beautiful bishop's hands. As he becomes calmhe has an imposing way of gently resettling himself in hissacerdotal dignity. To sum up: his is a physiognomy full ofpassion, consumed with zeal, yet still frank and sincere.

I was hardly seated, when with a motion of the hand he invitedme to speak.

"Monseigneur!" I said, "I come to you (you understand me?) asto my last resource. What I am now doing is almost an act ofdespair; for it might seem at first sight that no member ofthe family of Mademoiselle de Courteheuse must show himselfmore pitiless than yourself towards the faults with which Iam reproached. I am an unbeliever: you are an apostle! Andyet, Monseigneur, it is often at the hands of saintly priests,such as yourself, that the guilty find most indulgence. Andthen, I am not indeed guilty: I have but wandered. I am refusedthe hand of your niece because I do not share her faith--yourown faith. But, Monseigneur, unbelief is not a crime, it isa misfortune. I know people often say, a man denies God whenby his own conduct he has brought himself into a condition inwhich he may well desire that God does not exist. In thisway he is made guilty, or, in a sense, responsible for hisincredulity. For myself, Monseigneur, I have consulted myconscience with an entire sincerity; and although my youth hasbeen amiss, I am certain that my atheism proceeds from nosentiment of personal interest. On the contrary, I may tell youwith truth that the day on which I perceived my faith come tonought, the day on which I lost hope in God, I shed the bitteresttears of my life. In spite of appearances, I am not so light aspirit as people think. I am not one of those for whom God,when He disappears, [228] leaves no sense of a void place.Believe me!--a man may love sport, his club, his worldlyhabits, and yet have his hours of thought, of self-recollection. Do you suppose that in those hours one doesnot feel the frightful discomfort of an existence with nomoral basis, without principles, with no outlook beyond thisworld? And yet, what can one do? You would tell me forthwith,in the goodness, the compassion, which I read in your eyes;Confide to me your objections to religion, and I will try tosolve them. Monseigneur, I should hardly know how to answeryou. My objections are 'Legion!' They are without number,like the stars in the sky: they come to us on all sides, fromevery quarter of the horizon, as if on the wings of the wind;and they leave in us, as they pass, ruins only, and darkness.Such has been my experience, and that of many others; and ithas been as involuntary as it is irreparable."

"And I--Monsieur!" said the bishop, suddenly, casting on meone of his august looks, "Do you suppose that I am but aplay-actor in my cathedral church?"

"Monseigneur!"

"Yes! Listening to you, one would suppose that we were cometo a period of the world in which one must needs be either anatheist or a hypocrite! Personally, I claim to be neitherone nor the other."

"Need I defend myself on that point, Monseigneur? Need I saythat I did not come here to give you offence?"

"Doubtless! doubtless! Well, Monsieur, I admit; not withoutgreat reserves, mind! for one is always more or less responsiblefor the atmosphere in which he lives, the influences to whichhe is subject, for the habitual turn he gives to his thoughts;still, I admit that you are the victim of the incredulity of theage, that you are altogether guiltless in your scepticism, youratheism! since you have no fear of hard words. Is it thereforeany the less certain that the union of a fervent believer, suchas my niece, with a man like yourself would be a moral disorderof which the consequences might be disastrous? Do you think itcould be my duty, as a relative of Mademoiselle de Courteheuse,her spiritual father, as a prelate of the Church, to lend myhands to such disorder, to preside over the shocking union oftwo souls separated by the whole width of heaven?"

[229] The bishop, in proposing that question, kept his eyesfixed ardently on mine.

"Monseigneur," I answered, after a moment's embarrassment, "youknow as well as, and better than I, the condition of the world,and of our country, at this time. You know that unhappily Iam not an exception: that men of faith are rare in it. Andpermit me to tell you my whole mind. If I must needs sufferthe inconsolable misfortune of renouncing the happiness I hadhoped for, are you quite sure that the man to whom one of thesedays you will give your niece may not be something more thana sceptic, or even an atheist?"

"What, Monsieur?"

"A hypocrite, Monseigneur! Mademoiselle de Courteheuse isbeautiful enough, rich enough, to excite the ambition of thosewho may be less scrupulous than I. As for me, if you now knowthat I am a sceptic, you know also that I am a man of honour:and there is something in that!"

"A man of honour!" the bishop muttered to himself, with alittle petulance and hesitation. "A man of honour! Yes, Ibelieve it!" Then, after an interval, "Come, Monsieur," hesaid gently, "your case is not as desperate as you suppose.My Aliette is one of those young enthusiasts through whomHeaven sometimes works miracles." And Bernard refusing anyencouragement of that hope (the "very roots of faith aredead" in him for ever) "since you think that," the bishopanswers, "it is honest to say so. But God has His ways!"

Soon after, the journal comes to an end with that peculiar crisis inBernard's life which had suggested the writing of it. Aliette, withthe approval of her family, has given him her hand. Bernard acceptsit with the full purpose of doing all he can to make his wife ashappy as she is charming and beloved. The virginal first period oftheir married life in their dainty house in Paris--the pure andbeautiful picture of the mother, the father, and at last the child, alittle [230] girl, Jeanne--is presented with M. Feuillet's usualgrace. Certain embarrassments succeed; the development of what wasill-matched in their union; but still with mutual loyalty. A far-reaching acquaintance with, and reflection upon, the world and itsways, especially the Parisian world, has gone into the apparentlyslight texture of these pages. The accomplished playwright may berecognised in the skilful touches with which M. Feuillet, unrivalled,as his regular readers know, in his power of breathing higher notesinto the frivolous prattle of fashionable French life, develops thetragic germ in the elegant, youthful household. Amid thedistractions of a society, frivolous, perhaps vulgar, Aliette's mindis still set on greater things; and, in spite of a thousand rudediscouragements, she maintains her generous hope for Bernard'srestoration to faith. One day, a little roughly, he bids herrelinquish that dream finally. She looks at him with the moist,suppliant eyes of some weak animal at bay. Then his native goodnessreturns. In a softened tone he owns himself wrong.

"As to conversions;--no one must be despaired of. Do youremember M. de Rancé? He lived in your favourite age;--M. deRancé. Well! before he became the reformer of La Trappe hehad been a worldling like me, and a great sceptic--whatpeople called a libertine. Still he became a saint! It istrue he had a terrible reason for it. Do you know what itwas converted him?"

Aliette gave a sign that she did not know.

"Well! he returned to Paris after a few days' absence. He[231] ran straight to the lady he loved; Madame Montbazon,I think: he went up a little staircase of which he had thekey, and the first thing he saw on the table in the middleof the room was the head of his mistress, of which thedoctors were about to make a post-mortem examination."

"If I were sure," said Aliette, "that my head could havesuch power, I would love to die."

She said it in a low voice, but with such an accent of lovingsincerity that her husband had a sensation of a sort of painfuldisquiet. He smiled, however, and tapping her cheek softly,"Folly!" he said. "A head, charming as yours, has no need tobe dead that it may work miracles!"

Certainly M. Feuillet has some weighty charges to bring against theParisian society of our day. When Aliette revolts from a world ofgossip, which reduces all minds alike to the same level of vulgarmediocrity, Bernard, on his side, can perceive there a deteriorationof moral tone which shocks his sense of honour. As a man of honour,he can hardly trust his wife to the gaieties of a society whichwelcomes all the world "to amuse itself in undress."

It happened that at this perplexed period in the youthfulhousehold, one and the same person became the recipient bothof the tearful confidences of Madame de Vaudricourt and thoseof her husband. It was the Duchess of Castel-Moret [she isanother of M. Feuillet's admirable minor sketches] an oldfriend of the Vaudricourt family, and the only woman withwhom Aliette since her arrival in Paris had formed a kindof intimacy. The Duchess was far from sharing, on pointsof morality, and above all of religion, the severe andimpassioned orthodoxy of her young friend. She had lived,it is true, an irreproachable life, but less in consequenceof defined principles than by instinct and natural taste.She admitted to herself that she was an honest woman as aresult of her birth, and had no further merit in the matter.She was old, very careful of [232] herself, and a pleasantaroma floated about her, below her silvery hair. Peopleloved her for her grace--the grace of another time than ours--for her wit, and her worldly wisdom, which she placed freelyat the disposal of the public. Now and then she made a match:but her special gift lay rather in the way in which she cameto the rescue when a marriage turned out ill. And she had nosinecure: the result was that she passed the best part of hertime in repairing family rents. That might "last its time,"she would say. "And then we know that what has been wellmended sometimes lasts better than what is new."

A little later, Bernard, in the interest of Aliette, has chivalrouslydetermined to quit Paris. At Valmoutiers, a fine old place in theneighbourhood of Fontainebleau, they established themselves for acountry life. Here Aliette tastes the happiest days since hermarriage. Bernard, of course, after a little time is greatly bored.But so far they have never seriously doubted of their great love foreach other. It is here that M. Feuillet brings on the scene a kindof character new in his books; perhaps hardly worthy of the othercompany there; a sort of female Monsieur de Camors, but without hisgrace and tenderness, and who actually commits a crime. How wouldthe morbid charms of M. de Camors have vanished, if, as his wife oncesuspected of him, he had ever contemplated crime! And surely, theshowy insolent charms of Sabine de Tallevaut, beautiful,intellectually gifted, supremely Amazonian, yet withal not drawn withM. Feuillet's usual fineness, scarcely hold out for the reader, anymore than for [233] Bernard himself, in the long run, against thevulgarising touch of her cold wickedness. Living in theneighbourhood of Valmoutiers, in a somewhat melancholy abode (themystery of which in the eyes of Bernard adds to her poetic charm)with her guardian, an old, rich, freethinking doctor, devoted toresearch, she comes to Valmoutiers one night in his company on theoccasion of the alarming illness of the only child. They arriveescorted by Bernard himself. The little Jeanne, wrapped in hercoverlet, was placed upon the table of her play-room, which wasilluminated as if for a party. The illness, the operation (skilfullyperformed by the old doctor) which restores her to life, aredescribed with that seemingly simple pathos in which M. Feuillet'sconsummate art hides itself. Sabine remains to watch the child'srecovery, and becomes an intimate. In vain Bernard struggles againstthe first real passion of his life;--does everything but send itsobject out of his sight. Aliette has divined their secret. In thefatal illness which follows soon after, Bernard watches over her withtender solicitude; hoping against hope that the disease may take afavourable turn.

"My child," he said to her one day, taking the hand whichshe abandoned to him, "I have just been scolding old Victoire.She is losing her head. In spite of the repeated assurancesof the doctors, she is alarmed at seeing you a little worsethan usual to-day, and has had the Curé sent for. Do youwish to see him?"

"Pray let me see him!"

[234] She sighed heavily, and fixed upon her husband her largeblue eyes, full of anguish--an anguish so sharp and so singularthat he felt frozen to the marrow.

He could not help saying with deep emotion, "Do you love me nolonger, Aliette?"

"For ever!" murmured the poor child.

He leaned over her with a long kiss upon the forehead. She sawtears stealing from the eyes of her husband, and seemed as ifsurprised.

Soon afterwards Aliette is dead, to the profound sorrow of Bernard.Less than two years later he has become the husband of MademoiselleTallevaut. It was about two years after his marriage with Sabinethat Bernard resumed the journal with which we began. In the pageswhich he now adds he seems at first unchanged. How then as to thatstory of M. de Rancé, the reformer of La Trappe, finding the head ofhis dead mistress; an incident which the reader of La Morte willsurely have taken as a "presentiment"? Aliette had so taken it. "Ahead so charming as yours," Bernard had assured her tenderly, "doesnot need to be dead that it may work miracles!"--How, in the fewpages that remain, will M. Feuillet justify that, and certain otherdelicate touches of presentiment, and at the same time justify thetitle of his book?

The journal is recommenced in February. On the twentieth of AprilBernard writes, at Valmoutiers:

Under pretext of certain urgently needed repairs I am come topass a week at Valmoutiers, and get a little pure air. By myorders they have kept Aliette's room under lock and key since[235] the day when she left it in her coffin. To-day I re-entered it for the first time. There was a vague odour of herfavourite perfumes. My poor Aliette! why was I unable, as youso ardently desired, to share your gentle creed, and associatemyself to the life of your dreams, the life of honesty and peace?Compared with that which is mine to-day, it seems to me likeparadise. What a terrible scene it was, here in this room! Whata memory! I can still see the last look she fixed on me, a lookalmost of terror! and how quickly she died! I have taken the roomfor my own. But I shall not remain here long. I intend to gofor a few days to Varaville. I want to see my little girl: herdear angel's face.

VALMOUTIERS, April 22.--What a change there has been in the worldsince my childhood: since my youth even! what a surprising changein so short a period, in the moral atmosphere we are breathing!Then we were, as it were, impregnated with the thought of God--ajust God, but benevolent and fatherlike. We really lived underHis eyes, as under the eyes of a parent, with respect and fear,but with confidence. We felt sustained by His invisible butundoubted presence. We spoke to Him, and it seemed that Heanswered. And now we feel ourselves alone--as it were abandonedin the immensity of the universe. We live in a world, hard,savage, full of hatred; whose one cruel law is the struggle forexistence, and in which we are no more than those natural elements,let loose to war with each other in fierce selfishness, withoutpity, with no appeal beyond, no hope of final justice. And aboveus, in place of the good God of our happy youth, nothing, anymore! or worse than nothing--a deity, barbarous and ironical,who cares nothing at all about us.

The aged mother of Aliette, hitherto the guardian of his daughter,is lately dead. Bernard proposes to take the child away withhim to Paris. The child's old nurse objects. On April the twenty-seventh, Bernard writes:

For a moment--for a few moments--in that room where I have beenshutting myself up with the shadow of my poor [236] dead one, ahorrible thought had come to me. I had driven it away as aninsane fancy. But now, yes! it is becoming a reality. Shall Iwrite this? Yes! I will write it. It is my duty to do so; forfrom this moment the journal, begun in so much gaiety of heart,is but my last will and testament. If I should disappear fromthe world, the secret must not die with me. It must be bequeathedto the natural protectors of my child. Her interests, if not herlife, are concerned therein.

Here, then, is what passed: I had not arrived in time to rendermy last duty to Madame de Courteheuse. The family was alreadydispersed. I found here only Aliette's brother. To him Icommunicated my plan concerning the child, and he could butapprove. My intention was to bring away with Jeanne her nurseVictoire, who had brought her up, as she brought up her mother.But she is old, and in feeble health, and I feared somedifficulties on her part; the more as her attitude towards myselfsince the death of my first wife has been marked by an ill graceapproaching to hostility. I took her aside while Jeanne wasplaying in the garden.

"My good Victoire," I said, "while Madame de Courteheuse wasliving, I considered it a duty to leave her granddaughter inher keeping. Besides, no one was better fitted to watch overher education. At present my duty is to watch over it myself.I propose therefore to take Jeanne with me to Paris; and I hopethat you may be willing to accompany her, and remain in herservice." When she understood my intention, the old woman, inwhose hands I had noticed a faint trembling, became suddenlyvery pale. She fixed her firm, grey eyes upon me: "Monsieurle Comte will not do that!"

"Pardon me, my good Victoire, that I shall do. I appreciateyour good qualities of fidelity and devotion. I shall be verygrateful if you will continue to take care of my daughter, asyou have done so excellently. But for the rest, I intend tobe the only master in my own house, and the only master of mychild." She laid a hand upon my arm: "I implore you, Monsieur,don't do this!" Her fixed look did not leave my face, andseemed to be questioning me to the very bottom of my soul."I have never believed it," she murmured, "No! I [237] nevercould believe it. But if you take the child away I shall."

"Believe what, wretched woman? believe what?"

Her voice sank lower still. "Believe that you knew how hermother came by her death; and that you mean the daughter todie as she did."

"Die as her mother did?"

"Yes! by the same hand!"

The sweat came on my forehead. I felt as it were a breathing ofdeath upon me. But still I thrust away from me that terriblelight on things.

"Victoire!" I said, "take care! You are no fool: you aresomething worse. Your hatred of the woman who has taken theplace of my first wife--your blind hatred--has suggested toyou odious, nay! criminal words."

"Ah! Ah! Monsieur", she cried with wild energy. "Afterwhat I have just told you, take your daughter to live withthat woman if you dare."

I walked up and down the room awhile to collect my senses.Then, returning to the old woman, "Yet how can I believe you?"I asked. "If you had had the shadow of a proof of what yougive me to understand, how could you have kept silence so long?How could you have allowed me to contract that hateful marriage?"

She seemed more confident, and her voice grew gentler. "Monsieur,it is because Madame, before she went to God, made me take oathon the crucifix to keep that secret for ever."

"Yet not with me, in fact,--not with me!" And I, in turn,questioned her; my eyes upon hers. She hesitated: thenstammered out, "True! not with you! because she believed, poorlittle soul! that..."

"What did she believe? That I knew it? That I was an accomplice?Tell me!" Her eyes fell, and she made no answer. "Is itpossible, my God, is it possible? But come, sit by me here, andtell me all you know, all you saw. At what time was it younoticed anything--the precise moment?" For in truth she hadbeen suffering for a long time past.

Victoire tells the miserable story of Sabine's [238] crime--we mustpardon what we think a not quite worthy addition to the imaginaryworld M. Feuillet has called up round about him, for the sake offully knowing Bernard and Aliette. The old nurse had surprised herin the very act, and did not credit her explanation. "When Isurprised her," she goes on:

"It may already have been too late--be sure it was not the firsttime she had been guilty--my first thought was to give youinformation. But I had not the courage. Then I told Madame.I thought I saw plainly that I had nothing to tell she was notalready aware of. Nevertheless she chided me almost harshly.'You know very well,' she said, 'that my husband is always therewhen Mademoiselle prepares the medicines. So that he too wouldbe guilty. Rather than believe that, I would accept death athis hands a hundred times over!' And I remember, Monsieur, howat the very moment when she told me that, you came out fromthe little boudoir, and brought her a glass of valerian. Shecast on me a terrible look and drank. A few minutes afterwardsshe was so ill that she thought the end was come. She beggedme to give her her crucifix, and made me swear never to uttera word concerning our suspicions. It was then I sent for thepriest. I have told you, Monsieur, what I know; what I have